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Mark Hummel’s Harmonica Party

Bob Bell
Feb 275 min read

A living archive of post-war music of America, from blues to San Francisco psychedelia, and a whole bunch of entertaining tales along the way.




Musician Mark Hummel is a true blues survivor. He started on harmonica in 1970, started his band the Blues Survivors in 1977, and has been on the road ever since.


Over that time, he has worked or recorded with blues legends Charles Brown, Charlie Musselwhite, Lowell Fulson, Billy Boy Arnold, Carey Bell, Lazy Lester, Brownie McGhee, Eddie Taylor, Luther Tucker, and Jimmy Rogers. And those names are just the beginnings of a very, very long list.


However, I am not here to write about Mark’s musicianship, but to hopefully introduce music fans to another aspect of his career, that in which he has spent some of the last three years interviewing musicians, and getting their stories down on, well, we used to say on tape, but I guess now it is on pixels. In pixel? Among pixels?


The fact of the matter is that Mark, being on the road so much, and constantly working with seasoned musicians, had the bright idea to film himself, often in hotel rooms, talking with them.


Speaking to him recently, I asked him about the genesis of this remarkable archive and how it had come about.


‘What I did was, I put up a series of just blues kind of bios, and my interactions with different famous blues people. And I put those up on Facebook, and this guy contacted me out of the blue, and he says, ‘I really like what you're posting. Have you ever thought of doing a podcast?’

At first, I thought maybe he wanted me discuss what I had put up already, you know, with

these blues posts about basically dead guys. But he said, ‘Well, why don't you come over?'

And I said, ‘I don't know a thing about podcasts.’

He goes, ‘Well, I do, because I'm a documentary filmmaker, and I can do it for you’.

I went over to his house, and we did the first one, which was about James Harmon, right after he died. And right away, we got a ton of interest in the one on Harmon.

And that kind of spurred us into doing a lot more. And it took about maybe three or four where I just kind of talked about blues and things like that before I got the brainstorm of doing these as interviews, instead of just me talking to him about it, because initially it was just

me talking to him about Harmon or being on the road.

The very first one I think I did was Steve Freund. And then I followed that, I think, with Wes Starr and Kid Anderson, and it just kind of went from there and I just basically contacted everybody I knew, and I contacted a few people I didn't know.

And the latest one that's going to come out is one with Boz Scaggs, who I've known for a long time but really hadn't sat down and talked with him that much. I do about half of

them on the road. The other half I'll do around the Bay Area, like I'll go to Pete Sears' house, or Barry Melton's. Barry Melton was staying in a hotel when he was kind of in between homes.

Country Joe, I went to his house. Barbara Dane, I went to her house. Who else? Boz, I met at a coffee house in North Beach.’


I mentioned to Mark that much of the appeal of what he was doing was because it was sort of a living encyclopedia of what has been going on in the post-60s blues world, and not just the blues world in particular, but touching rock and other genres too.


‘Yeah, and that was kind of my real goal with this. And it started as I began contacting people that I knew were involved in the 60s scene, somebody like Peter Albin from Big Brother or Country Joe or people that I'd known for a ong time that were right in the middle of the Fillmore and Avalon scenes.

And that was because I wanted to do this thing of, how can I put it? What it was like to be in the middle of that when it happened, because it was such an exciting time for both rock and blues.

Because blues got rediscovered at that point. Rock, you know, the rock and roll thing in San Francisco was just starting. So it was an interesting kind of period where things were just kind of starting to just go hog wild in music. In terms of what Bill Graham did and what Chet Helms did.


Asking Mark which interviews were his favorites, a question which was, I guess, rather like asking a parent which child is his or her favorite.


‘The ones I would recommend are the Gravenites which is incredible.

The Barbara Dane one is incredible. Musselwhite’s is great. Oh, man, who else would I recommend? Rick Estrin's is crazy. Duke's (Duke Robillard) is great. There are a number of them that are just really phenomenal. The Willie Chambers one. (The Chambers Brothers). He's got a great interview on here. They're fascinating interviews. I mean, because those

guys, pretty much all the ones I named, I did like two and three-hour interviews. So they're long. But they're really just amazing pieces of history. I get thrills out of doing this, man. I really do! I mean, doing the one with Boz was amazing. He really opened up to me. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff he's done that people don't know about. He was basically a street singer in Copenhagen, I think, or Stockholm. I never knew that until I listened to an older interview of him from a long time ago.

So I didn't know he did his own booking either. He did his own booking right up until 'Silk Degrees'. He did his own managing and booking, which I thought was incredible.

It's the way you keep your costs down. It's the way you keep control. And it's also a way that, you know, nobody's going to really look out for you like you.’


And nobody’s looking out for the history of the music in the way that Mark Hummel’s Harmonica Party is.


Whether your interests are the blues or the San Francisco rock scene in the 60’s or everything in between, you’ll find so many interesting things, so many humorous tales, so many hitherto unknown facts, and hopefully you’ll be introduced to new musicians, and rediscover some forgotten icons along the way.


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There are around seventy of these interviews to date. That is a banquet's worth of viewing and you can find them here.



May I suggest just a few as a kind of hors d'oeuvres?


 
 
 

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